Freakonomics

Of God and Money

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an economics lab. Which one is most likely to increase contributions to the public good? <p><a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/l6omN...

A Few Questions for Belle de Jour, Call Girl and Scientist

In 2003, a young American woman in London studying for her PhD. ran into money trouble. To support herself while writing her thesis, she joined an escort service. Under the assumed name Belle de Jo...

Why Do We Hate?

"What makes hate tick? How can we stop it?" These are the questions that Jim Mohr, director of Gonzaga University's Institute for Action Against Hate, asks himself every day as he develops a new fi...

Introducing "Applied Freakonomics"

When blog reader Kyle contacted us with his story of how thinking "freakonomically" first netted - then lost - him significant amounts of incremental income, we had what we'd call an "aha moment," ...

When Football Violence Turns Real

It's well-established that domestic violence is bad for the children directly exposed to it (and possibly their classmates as well) but experts still debate the drivers of family violence. Economis...

Quotes Uncovered: Who First Said "If You Can't Beat Em ... "

Each week, I've been inviting readers to submit quotations for which they want me to try to trace the origin, using <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Yale-Book-Quotations-Fred-Shapiro/dp/0300107986...

Nathan Myhrvold, Mad Chef

Nathan Myhrvold is the Intellectual Ventures chieftain we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics; I.V. has plans to thwart, inter alia, hurricanes, malaria, and global warming. (He has also written for t...

Improving Well-Being in the Classroom

Four of the 26 students in my Economics of Life class proposed delaying submitting their draft term project reports by one week. I emailed the whole class and gave them one day to let me know if th...

What Are the Coming Decade's Most Overblown Fears?

Newsweek is running an online retrospective of the new millennium's first decade. My favorite section to date is the "Overblown Fears" list. Here they are, in order: 1. Y2K 2. Shoe Bombs 3. Va...

The Latest in Naked Self-Promotion

If you missed Levitt and Dubner on their U.K. SuperFreakonomics tour, a podcast of their lecture at the London School of Economics is now online. So are their interviews with Reuters TV, Channel 4,...